Lovell's Wharf, a ton of milk powder and the Cutty Sark

I don’t usually do memories, but this picture by Barry Lilburn of Lovell’’s Wharf from 1981 brought a shed load of memories back.

Lovell's Wharf, 1981

A full decade and a bit earlier I had regularly walked that walk, after the shift at Glenville’s the food factory by Tunnel Avenue.

I worked for the firm on and off from 1969 through to 1972, working in the dispatch area of the new factory, but more frequently in the milk plant, where we turned powdered milk into granules, which the adverts proclaimed was better in instant tea and coffee.

It was hot and heavy work and we worked the shifts, 2 till 10 and 6 till 2.
Now anyone who has done those shifts will know, both pretty much wreck your social life.

Getting to work for 6 in the morning didn’t preclude nights out in the pub but waking up in the morning after the night before could be challenging.

Walking the River, 1979

Likewise leaving work at 10 pm, limited the opportunities to meet up with friends in a pub and wiped out going to the cinema or the theatre.

All of that said, there were plenty of times when we walked the short distance in the afternoon to catch the last hour in the Cutty Sark.

I first started going to the pub in the late 1960s, usually in the summer months, when we would sit on the low concrete wall and watch as the sun set, and night fell across the river.

There was something quite magical about it, made all the more memorable watching the odd pleasure boat pass, and listen as the wash pushed the barges together making that distinctive clunking side, which accompanied the low buzz of conversation.

All a bit different form the afternoon sessions, when smart young things inhabited the place.  Some of whom I suspect had crossed from that other place to see what we did in South East London.

Looking towards Glenville's, 1979

And here I must confess to my shame we took delight in playing a very childish game of standing as close as we could to these smart young things in our milk caked overalls.

Never underestimate just how much milk powder can cling to your overalls in the course of an eight hour shift, even more so on a very hot day, when most of the time you were in front of a tap filling the milk granules into 56 lb. bags, before then emptying them into hoppers.

I suppose compared to much of the work done along this side of the river, ours might well be judged light and easy.

But it was not a job I liked, and finally there came a time when I moved on.  More recently I went back looking for the factory, but the passage of more than 40 years has wiped out much of what I knew.

And with that comes that other challenge to my memory which is, were we able to walk all the way along the River from Glenville’s to the Cutty Sark?

I think we did, but it was a long time ago.

Either way I have Barry to thank for bringing the milk plant out of my memory, for a short stroll on an indifferent day in Manchester.

Location; Lovell’s Wharf

Picture; Lovell’s Wharf, 1981, courtesy of Barry Lilburn and in 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Just what did John Duckworth think of no. 5 Victoria Terrace in the spring of 1851?

It is of course a silly question, because we will never know.  

He left no letters expressing his opinions, nor did anyone else leave a record of what he said, and in all there are just a handful official documents which carry his name.

These include two census returns, a marriage certificate, and an entry in the burial records of All Saints Church in Chorlton Upon Medlock.

All of which amounts to slim pickings and clearly offer no insight into what he thought about anything, let alone Victoria Terrace, which was a row of 14 back to back properties set back from Fairfield Street and bordered on two sides by the River Medlock.

Together with another ten houses, they were home to 102 people in 1851, and of these number 5 was rented out to John Duckworth.

He shared the house with his wife, Esther, their son William, and John’s brother.  Both John and his brother were mechanics and on the 1851 census John described himself as a spindle maker.

He had been born in 1821 and was from Chorlton on Medlock, but by the 1840s was living on Travis Street, just a few minutes’ walk from London Road Railway Station.  

Esther, who was from Altrincham had been living on St James Street which was behind Mosley Street when the couple married in 1850.

But number 5 Victoria Terrace,was not their first marital home, the Rate Books show that they had moved in sometime between January and April of 1851, after the previous tenant had moved on.

And here there is a little mystery, because according to the census return their son William was 7 years old, which fits with a record of his baptism from 1845 at the parish church.

Of course, there may have been another John and Esther Duckworth with a son called William.

Either way their stay at Victoria Terrace appears to have been a short one and within two years John had died, and was buried in All Saints Church in Chorlton on Medlock.

Which leaves us none the wiser about what he thought about the small enclave of homes, which consisted of Victoria Terrace and Coronation Square.

The houses date from around the old Queen’s coronation in 1837, and the first record of them appears in the Rate Books two years later when they were owned by William Walker, who sold them on to a Sarah Glossop.

We know that the properties which made up Victoria Terrace each consisted of four rooms and the remaining properties were a mix of four three and two roomed houses.

What might have struck us, would have been the range of different accents of those who lived there, for while over half of the resident had been born in Manchester, Chorlton on Medlock or Hulme, there for those from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well  London, Yorkshire and the Lake District.

Added to this, the enclave was young, with over a quarter of the population under the age of 15, and almost another quarter between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four.

And over the course of the next few weeks, we shall look at the occupations of the 102 residents, and just how many of them had been here a decade earlier or indeed ten years later.

For now I will just ponder in a very unhistorical way of what it might have been like to live there, on those cold dark nights with perhaps the occasional noise from the railway viaduct as a train went by, or the distinctive clunk of wagons being shunted around the nearby goods yard.

Or the powerful smell from the river, on a hot and still August day.

But that, like the speculation of what  John Duckworth thought about Victoria Terrace is idle tosh.

Location; Fairfield Street

Pictures; detail of Victoria Terrace and Coronation Square, in 1904, m11492, & nos 14 & 16 Victoria Terrace, July 1900, A. Bradburn, m11490, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and in1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of courtesy of Digital Archives Association http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 16, when our water came from pumps and wells

Continuing the story of Chorlton in just a paragraph. They are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.

Just over 40 years ago there was still a working water pump on Beech Road, and only a few years before that, old farmer Higginbotham finally got round to filling in his old well in the garden of his farmhouse on the green.  All of which goes to remind us that before the arrival of mains water in 1864 from Manchester, the township was reliant on pumps, wells, ponds and streams.  Now my picture was collected by Lois in a village in Sussex but I have every expectation that if you had walked through Chorlton something like 160 years ago there would have been plenty of similar ones.  We might mourn their passing but collecting the water from a pump was a chore and one that had to be done three or four times a day, and by the 1880s most supplies had either become polluted or dried up.  Nevertheless the public pumps were a meeting place and by all accounts a magic place for a six year old to play on hot summer’s days.

Picture; from the collection of Lois Elsden

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 23 .............. Mincing Street ..... not even a street name

Now Mincing Street seems so insignificant that even the Corporation hasn’t bothered to award it a street sign.

Mincing Street, 1899

It runs from Aspin Lane to the junction of Corporation Street and Dantzic Street and at present is surrounded on both sides by open land.  This land and the street itself exists as somewhere to park your car which I suppose is why it doesn’t any more even qualify for that street name.

So of all our forgotten and lost streets it does really merit going to the top of list.

Of course once it was much more.  In the middle of the 19th century there were twenty-five properties running along the two side of the street and there was also access to a closed court of back to houses which was called simply Court No 1.

And if that was not enough at the western end of the street gave access to Holden Street which contained another seventeen houses some of which were back to back and some which faced a series of closed courts which didn’t even get titles.

Nelson Street, 1851

It took me a little time to track Mincing Street down because back in the 1850s it was called Nelson Street and continued east under the railway viaduct to terminate at the river Irk.

Why its name was changed is unclear given that just a little to the north there is still a Little Nelson Street which might have been a candidate for a name change,

But names changes were at some point clearly in the wind given that Dantzic Street was in 1949 known as New Blakeley Street and two years later was Charter Street while today what is Aspin Lane was Ashley Lane.

I suspect that it wil not be long before those car parks are built on and given the size of the individual properties that have already gone up in the surrounding streets the density of occupation may not be so different from what it had been in 1851.

All of which just leaves me to thank Antony Mills for suggesting Mincing Street and providing me with three photographs of Little Nelson Street.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Mincing Street with a family on step, 1899, C.H. Godfrey, m03380, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Nelson Street in 1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 14, petrol pumps on Claude Road

Continuing the story of Chorlton in just a paragraph. They are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.

It was at the top of Claude Road as it turns west and is an odd place to site a petrol pump.  I remember it well and vaguely used to wonder why it was there.  My photograph dates from 1972 and the pump was still there twenty or so years later until the bit of land behind the pump was developed into a row of houses in what is now Rainbow Close.  Before that it was just a bit of open land and I guess was the site of either a garage or small builder’s yard.  Now the Egerton and Lloyd estates had not permitted industrial development here in Chorlton but there were plenty of small areas given over to the working of local craftsmen which will  feature in more detail tomorrow, so it maybe that our pump served just such an enterprise.

Which just leaves me to add from a contributor, "I grew up at 41 Claude road there were two petrol pumps one either side.it was a row of workshops where they did repair cars they also owned no. 45 Claude Road which they rented out.the owner had a classic car with running boards and a starting handle as kids in the 70's we cut through the garages to get to the brook to play."

Picture; Street furniture on Claude Road, 1972, m58833, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

The view from the hill ........ home thoughts from abroad no. 5

Now sometimes it takes just one picture to remind me how long I have been away from home.

The scene will be all too familiar to many. 

From the top of the hill beside the Royal Observatory you have a panoramic view of the city.

To the left there is the bend of the River and off to the right the chimneys of the power station and directly ahead the tall blocks of the new commercial London.

And I say familiar but not to me, because the last time I gazed out from those benches beside the statue of General Wolf none of those tall blocks of glass, steel and buzzing enterprise existed.

The tallest building would still have been the Monument and I am pretty sure St Paul’s would also have been visible.

I was well aware at what had been going on but the change is still very dramatic given that I last looked out from the hill sometime in the early 1970s and while I have been back to the park and down into Greenwich I somehow never quite got to take the route from the gates at Blackheath to the observatory and look across London.

That last time had been a perfect autumnal day in 1971, the sun shone, the leaves were turning golden and I was home from Manchester with a group of friends proudly showing off my bit of London.

They were duly impressed taking in first that scene from the hill and then by degree descending into Greenwich, taking in the Cutty Sark, the foot tunnel and one or two of the local pubs.

It is a pity I never took my own picture but perhaps someone who did will share it so that I can compare our Jill’s picture with the past.

And yesterday Phil Mackie sent over some of his from 1974 which will appear later in the week.

Location; London

Picture; looking out across London, July 2017, from the collection of Jillian Goldsmith

36 barrels of gunpowder ..... that horrendous act .... and a noisy night of fireworks

Now there is a pernicious and pervasive way of thinking which looks for conspiracy everywhere.

Mutterings and secret plans, 1604

As a way of looking at the world it isn’t new, and can be traced back to those who wile away the wasted hours seeking to disprove that there ever was a moon landing, to the sinister Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was a fabricated antisemitic text, and runs back into the mists of time.

All that is needed is an event which someone will seek to deny, or bend to their own political purposes.

And we are all familiar with the assertion that the Covid virus was not real, but when challenged with the evidence, advocates often switch tack and argue that it is in the interests of “them” to manufacture the scare, thereby to increase the powers of State surveillance, or manipulate the international markets.

Attempting to refute them is like counting the grains of sand in a bucket or pushing water up hill.

More recently I have followed the line of that radical 18th century writer Thomas Paine who wrote “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, ….. is like administering medicine to the dead”.  

It a powerful guide to how to treat the outlandish arguments of those who have travelled beyond the borders of reason and reminds me of Deborah Lipstadt’s often referenced explanation for why she doesn’t debate with Holocaust Deniers because it is as pointless as discussing with “flat-Earthers or the Elvis-is-alive people”.*

All of that said there is a fine line between conspiracy theories and reinterpretations of past events. **

And as this is November 5th it neatly leads into the failed Gunpowder Plot, that awful act of planned terrorism which was so horrendous that its failure continues to be celebrated every year since Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators were caught and executed.

In recent years the celebrations have been eclipsed by Halloween, so while the fireworks will burst on either side of November 5th and continue like a damp squib for perhaps a week few kids now take to the street asking for “a penny for the Guy” and heaps will not even know the historical significance of burning the guy and setting off fireworks.

Plotting the unthinkable 1604

Suffice to say the story goes that a group of “Catholic gentlemen” in the face of continued official hostility to Catholics chose to stage a coup by blowing up the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament on November 5th.  

If it had succeeded the entire political establishment would have been killed, the State left leaderless and in the vacuum the plotters would have placed the King’s daughter on the throne and manipulated her to run the country.

So far so good, but it failed. 

The ringleaders were captured, tried, and executed and things got a lot worse for Catholics.

But even at the time some questioned elements of the plot, citing the King’s chief advisor as implicated in a “set up”.

Conspiracies and disasters, 1970s

In the 1890s and since some historians have revisited the story, deconstructed the events and the evidence, discrediting the official version.

All of which offered some of us a fine set of history lessons where we presented the traditional account, offered up suspected flaws and led our year 8 history students to draw their own conclusions.

In 1996 the historian Antonia Fraser presented her interpretation which while it accepted that there was a plot challenged bits of the narrative. ***

And over the next few days I shall revisit her book, reading it as the last fireworks burst into the night and reflect that while there are and have always been real conspiracies, the default line of many is to see conspiracies where they don’t exist, and trade on assertions and half-truths.

Pictures; a contemporary drawing of the Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, and a popular badge from the 1970s

Guy Fawkes, Catesby and Winter, 1604

*Thomas Paine US History, https://www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-05.htm

**“administering medicine to the dead” ……. The American War of Independence ..... and Thomas Paine, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2021/11/administering-medicine-to-dead-american.html

*** The Gunpowder Plot, Terror & Faith in 1605, Antonia Fraser, 1996